ronan
Ronan Cremin leads engineering efforts at DeviceAtlas. He focuses on building device intelligence applications, such as the award-winning DeviceAtlas and DeviceAssure products. Mr. Cremin also represents DeviceAtlas at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Latest Articles by ronan
Mobile web content adaptation techniques
November 1, 2011, by ronan
Introduction This article will help you pick from amongst the many techniques for building a mobile website. It doesn't describe how to do it, rather it instead tries to help you to pick the right approach. Before we begin it's worth clarifying exactly what the goal of the exercise is. Generally speaking, people who are looking to build a mobile site fall into two categories. They're either:... Read More
The best of breakingdevelopment conference
September 15, 2011, by ronan
As many of you know, the breakingdevelopment conference took place in Nashville, Tennessee over the last few days. It appears to have been a really seminal conference with 13 leading mobile web developers speaking. Others have already put together summaries of the conference but I thought I'd link to what I thought were the most interest presentations... Read More
Device Diversity
July 7, 2011, by ronan
As dotMobi brings DeviceAtlas to the cloud Ronan Cremin, Director of Engineering at dotMobi, charts the increasing complexity of the device landscape for developers in the first of two pieces looking at device fragmentation. In the beginning the web was a much simpler place. By the time the web was becoming a mainstream media in the late 1990’s there was only one device through which you accessed it: the humble desktop PC, running one of just a handful of browsers... Read More
Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web
October 7, 2010, by ronan
With all of the buzz around apps & app stores it would be easy to assume that mobile apps have unstoppable momentum and that the mobile web is taking a back seat. It's worth taking a step back to see how this is all going to pan out. Will mobile apps dominate completely and overwhelm the mobile web or does the mobile web still stand a chance?... Read More
The breadth and diversity of the mobile web
September 23, 2010, by ronan
For a mass medium to really get traction and achieve critical mass it is important that creating content is as easy as consuming it—the growth of the medium tracks the availability of the content creation tools. In the early days of the web hackers used home-grown web servers to serve content and a copy of Vi to author it. It wasn't long before Apache and other web servers eased the job of serving the content but the creation of good web content remained the preserve of experts... Read More
Measuring the Effects of Operator Transcoders
June 23, 2010, by ronan
The issue of mobile-operator transcoders on the mobile web has been hugely controversial. For many iPhone and Android phone owners the negative effects of the transcoders are no longer visible and the issue has dropped off the radar, but they remain a serious problem for those using lower-end devices... Read More
A minimal mobile-aware web app with Python & cloud-based device detection
September 21, 2009, by ronan
In this article we'll look at a how to make a minimal device-aware web application. The point of this article is not to demonstrate a useful application but rather to show just how little code is required to make an app that is fully device aware, and that can change its presentation entirely depending on the nature of the device accessing it... Read More
The Beauty of Mobile Device Data
September 16, 2009, by ronan
Recently at dotMobi we have been investigating how to make our DeviceAtlas device detection even better, while at the same time trying to keep the size of the distributable database as compact as possible. As some of you may know, DeviceAtlas uses a tree of data stored in a very compact JSON file to distribute our device data knowledge. The actual format of this JSON file is a Patricia tree organised around the user-agent strings of the devices that we have data about... Read More
Battle of the Superphones: Palm Pre vs. Apple iPhone – which is a better Web browsing device?
June 16, 2009, by ronan
There are already countless reviews of the newly announced Palm Pre available online. Rather than write another one, we instead are going to focus on what we, and we hope, our readers, are most interested in: how does the Pre fare as a web browsing device. In particular, we're going to test how well it does against its arch-rival, the iPhone. Can the Pre out-iPhone the iPhone? We're going to ignore the app store, the widgets, the battery life, the media player and instead focus on web browsing. ... Read More
Build a Mobile and Desktop-Friendly Application in Django in 15 Minutes
January 5, 2009, by ronan
This article quickly walks you through the process of setting up an absolutely minimal mobile- and desktop-friendly web application using the Django framework. This particular framework works very well with mobile thanks to the way its templates are structured and makes for a good choice for new web-based applications... Read More
